Melbourne...

This indigo city which is not grey,
is not a thing but a situation
or atmosphere or layers of living,
beginning with the earth that hoards the bones,
artefacts and lost words of ancient folk
who are not my ancestors and to whom
I wish to pay my respects, for over
their unknowable songs, their past of togetherness, all one-ness, we laid
our history of separate histories;
 
single doorways, gates and grates and ghettoes
of unique belief, of language, even
our forensic presence – footprints, fragments
of hair, skin that falls into the ever-
transmuting light, which is not grey but the
shimmering colour of a dove’s wing (think
of the NGV, its moat and water-
wall, the stone like fresh-cut lead,
that stuff has crystals in it you know -- it’s not grey but
indigo.) We plait ourselves into this
place which offers itself, clean of account -
we each know our discrete moment walking
the swirling corridor of Collins Street
in that renowned wind, past 101 and
churches with dusty hides like elephants.
This indigo city which lies beneath
skies of milk or cobalt or Prussian blue or
oppressive thunderclouds, such unspent force;
elsewhere El Greco painted skies like ours.
This theatre of breath and cloud is not
grey, which has neither black’s eternal might
Nor the polar finality of white
and is indeterminate, is nothing;
nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
Smog and sunlight, air the hue of opals,
veils of light shuffling through our laneways like
a deck of cards, this ‘devil’s colour’ stands
alone, until it reveals its secret
on the ubiquitous necks of pigeons;
indigo forfeits itself from alone
 
to all one-one iridescence in the sun.

First published in Reflecting on Melbourne, Poetica Christie Press